Date of Submission

Spring 2017

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Studio Arts

Project Advisor 1

Laura Battle

Abstract/Artist's Statement

One point of departure:

I'm trying to slow down just enough to even begin to notice what's at work here. Not just the here, as in now, but the here as in the big, vast, complex here that we are all moving within and around. I realize that everything I make is/reflects part of me, but also part of every person I know, every person they know, all the times I've questioned brushing my teeth in both the morning and the evening, every time I notice a deer notice me, curled up with Matilda inside my mom- pressed up into her rib cage, the grief of a resident in tivoli whose daughter just died, the way the colors stand out in winter because they have room to breathe, being awake in the middle of the night and realizing how quiet the world can be, making nests, my love for anything oat, the symbiotic relationship between a nocturnal squid and bioluminescent bacteria, the fleeting burning sensation in your eyes at night when you pass a car whose brights are on, gamma's mourning dove, the lunar halo last week, my impulse to include, gather, harvest, revisit... I'm looking to find where things have yet to be named, are on the cusp of becoming. (I know I will not ever find it.)

A big part of how we understand seems to be by what something is not. What surrounds something informs us what that something is. But what slips through the cracks? What surrounds the surroundings? My meanwhile is different than yours, which is different than the meanwhiles of everyone else. But maybe there's a moment where we can meet- maybe there's potential for our meanwhile to ask us to pause and tune in to what's really at play. What tinkers and toys and intertwines beneath the easier surface. What begins to refract light onto our individual modes of experience, which in turn bounces back to the more general, which continues to morph, depending on who is looking.

My work has been tuning in to this threshold, teasing out what we may take for granted, and what it takes to make us notice. I set up patterns in my installations and sculptures: color schemes, structures made up of pipes and cords and other conduits, but then rupture the pattern in the hopes of inciting the viewer to reconsider the work. I’m interested in collecting connections. The materials I often use are saved and given to me by people in my life: rubber molding given to me by a friend over the summer, lint collected by my grandma in Bayside, shredded documents from the office I occasionally work at near school, green-blue berry cartons saved by my boyfriend’s mom. I’m looking to develop deliberate accumulations of these encounters. I feel as though I’m mapping a network that exists within the materials I gather, the people that contribute to what I make, the ideas I have, the books or architectures that inspire me, the things or people I’ve lost, the constant unfurlings.

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